Permission Denied While Root?

bingusboingus · 11-10-2022, 10:07 AM

Hello! I'm trying to mount a drive, and using the following command to mount:

sudo mount /dev/sda /dat

Even while being root or using sudo, I get the following error:

mount: /dat: permission denied.

Could someone tell me what I am doing wrong? Thank you!

smallpond · 11-10-2022, 10:17 AM

Is the drive partitioned? Although it is possible to write a filesystem onto the whole sda drive, normally a drive has a label and at last one partition.

For example, the first partition of /dev/sda would be /dev/sda1. To mount that partition: sudo mount /dev/sda1 /dat

sundialsvcs · 11-10-2022, 10:52 AM

Spot on. /dev/sda is a reference to the entire device, but only partitions can be "mounted."

elgrandeperro · 11-10-2022, 03:43 PM

Permission denied, probably you have a login shell sitting in /dat. It won't mount a filesystem where any process's cwd is sitting in the directory.

frankbell · 11-10-2022, 07:59 PM

Have you created a mount point?

Normally, you create a mount point for a partition, then you mount the mount point, rather than mounting the device directly.

syg00 · 11-11-2022, 12:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs

Spot on. /dev/sda is a reference to the entire device, but only partitions can be "mounted."

Nope.
Filesystems get mounted - it is certainly possible to define a filesystem over a device node without creating a partition table.

TenTenths · 11-11-2022, 03:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by syg00

Nope.
Filesystems get mounted - it is certainly possible to define a filesystem over a device node without creating a partition table.

There's one sysadmin that used to work with my current company that did that, a lot, made troubleshooting a bit strange until you remembered what he liked to do.

pan64 · 11-11-2022, 04:44 AM

this is just the duplication of your other thread.
What is in /dat? How was it created? You need to check that (it was a dir at all). Permisison denied means the mount itself will try to attempt to modify something which is not allowed, but we don't know how is your system configured.

Code:

       EPERM  The caller does not have the required privileges.

       EPERM  An attempt was made to modify (MS_REMOUNT) the MS_RDONLY,
              MS_NOSUID, or MS_NOEXEC flag, or one of the "atime" flags
              (MS_NOATIME, MS_NODIRATIME, MS_RELATIME) of an existing
              mount, but the mount is locked; see mount_namespaces(7).

MadeInGermany · 11-11-2022, 08:55 AM

Check with

Code:

lsblk

if it is used by something (swap, lvm, partition,...).

Mount point missing or busy gives other error messages.

Debian6to11 · 11-11-2022, 09:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MadeInGermany

Check with

Code:

lsblk

if it is used by something (swap, lvm, partition,...).

Mount point missing or busy gives other error messages.

Timeshift does that and if I remember well the partition stays mounted when you shut the application.